Every ‚Taken‘ movie begins with an aggrieved badass and a particular set of skills. Here are the best of that genre.
I told a friend last week, “there’s a new Taken movie out with Liam Neeson.” “They made another Taken movie?” he asked, incredulous. Well, not exactly, but yes. It was called The Marksman, and like most Liam Neeson action movies since 2008, it was essentially a Taken movie in everything but name. I think we all know what a “Taken movie” is by now. Key and Peele perfectly distilled the phenomenon for posterity in their recurring valet sketches, which eventually grew beyond “Liam Neesons” to encompass everyone from Bruce Willy to Anne Hathaway. One man (or, sure, woman), at least 40 to 45 years of age but preferably older, has something important taken from him — his wife, his daughter, his dog, his car, or maybe just a rug that really tied the room together (no, The Big Lebowski doesn’t count, but that’d be a fun parody). That now-pissed-off person must then have “a particular set of skills” that make him a nightmare for all the kidnappers and rug thieves out there. Thus begins his (or her!) one-person revenge rampage (no buddy revenge movies, no “one last score movies,” those are different). All of which got us to thinking: what are the best non-Taken Taken Movies? I tried to outline the best of the genre below, as well as create a brief taxonomy of why they qualify as “Taken movies.” Such as: the reason for their revenge rampage (“this time, it’s personal”), and the personal qualities they bring to it (“a particular set of skills.”). Movie: Rambo Last Blood Liam Neesons? 73-year-old Sylvester Stallone This Time… It’s Personal Rambo’s adopted granddaughter goes to Mexico to try to find her father, who tells her that he never cared about her, and when she goes to drink away her troubles she gets drugged and kidnapped by a drug cartel who want to sell her into sex slavery. A Particular Set Of Skills In short… he’s Rambo. Or as he puts it in Rambo (aka Rambo IV, aka John Rambo, aka the Rambo movie before this one) “You know what you are. What you’re made of. War is in your blood. Don’t fight it. You didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself. The gods are never gonna make that go away. When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.” General Thoughts Rambo: Last Blood is one of the all-time masterpieces in accidentally (?) saying the quiet part out loud. It’s one of the goriest, most xenophobic movies ever made, in which a now actually-ghoulish looking Sylvester Stallone is a Frankenstein’s monster of grievance politics. Stallone has always been legitimately brilliant when it comes to having his finger on the pulse of Americans’ worst impulses at any given time, whether it be furthering the POW/MIA canard in Rambo II or dedicating Rambo III to the mujahideen, and Last Blood is his BUILD THE WALL! The man also can’t not make an entertaining movie. Last Blood is like Taken, only 10 times more violent and xenophobic. Movie: The Outlaw Josie Wales Liam Neesons? 46-year-old Clint Eastwood. This Time… It’s Personal Josey Wales is a simple Missouri farmer, until one day, a gang of pro-Union Jayhawks murders his wife and son. A Particular Set Of Skills Wales joins a Confederate militia and survives a massacre. If Wales learning to fight from the Confederacy seems somewhat… ah… problematic… we’ll get to that. General Thoughts Folks… I fell down the rabbit hole with this one. I always thought of Josey Wales as a sort of proto-Taken, with pissed-off old Clint Eastwood spitting tobacco juice on everyone, and it is, but I didn’t entirely remember the plot. Nor did I realize that it was based on a novel by “Forrest Carter,” which was actually the pen name of Asa Earl Carter, a former KKK leader and speechwriter for George Wallace. Carter even wrote the “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech. He later fell out with Wallace on account of Wallace not being racist enough, and ran against him in the 1970 primary. If you’re wondering why a story that seems so pro-Confederate is also so pro-Native American, well, Carter’s fake writer persona, “Forrest Carter” was Cherokee (Asa also claimed Cherokee ancestry). Though one might also note that he named his persona “Forrest”…after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Klan. Carter even wrote a fake Native American memoir that Oprah put on her recommended reading list (side note: how many times has Oprah been duped by a fake memoir??). The Outlaw Josie Wales‘ original screenwriter Philip Kaufman, was apparently aware of this and tried to tone it down: The film’s first director, Philip Kaufman, was not impressed by “The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales.
